The Labour Party has always been intolerant of the free press

I recommend that you read this piece in the Times of Malta. It’s a good one. But it’s symptomatic of general blindness that other journalists are only just now waking up to the fact that the Labour Party is completely intolerant of the free press, and their awakening has been prompted by the fact that now, they have become targets too.

For years I have been the target of sustained assaults by the Labour Party – and not just me, but also my sons and other members of my family – across all its media, print, broadcast and the internet, official and unofficial. The fascist, totalitarian targeting has been so ghastly that there is not a single person left on the island who doesn’t know my name, even if they can’t spell or pronounce it and even if they can’t read Maltese let alone English and so have never read a single thing I have written. They don’t know what I write, but they know they should hate me and insult me.

The Labour Party has tried literally everything. It is only because I am naturally tenacious that I carry on. The more they chuck at me, the less likely I am to give in. This is a bloody-minded personality trait that has so far foxed and confounded them, because I rather suspect it is the first time they have encountered it in somebody they wish to decimate. A person with less mental and spiritual strength would probably have flung herself off a bridge, sunk into depression or simply given in, given up and got them off her back by doing what they want her to do.

I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me that I shouldn’t bother, that I should stop writing because it’s doing me no good, that I only have one life & c & c. I can see they mean well, but unlike those sorts of people, I am not prone to nihilism, and I don’t like wasting my time playing bridge or tennis or marking the days out in cups of coffee with friends. Besides which, it would be the coward’s way out.

But as long as it was only me the Labour Party attacked, no other journalists bothered. There were three reasons for this.

Some decided that I deserved it – because you know how it is, if a journalist criticises Labour politicians and their camp followers and mocks them, she deserves to be targeted by the entire machinery of that political party. And that’s quite normal, isn’t it, outside Beijing and Baku. Of course it isn’t. It’s completely abnormal.

Then there were those who didn’t like me, who still don’t, either personally or because of what I write, and so got some kind of twisted, perverted pleasure out of seeing me made the target of the huge Labour machine. They were not only journalists, among whom professional jealousy and not just personal resentment were major factors. They were also ordinary people and significant people in our society who should have known better, but didn’t. In its perversity, this sentiment is akin to taking pleasure in watching your annoying neighbour being hauled out of her home by the secret police and made to disappear. You’ve got rid of her, yes – but what are the consequences for democracy, for society, if that kind of thing can happen?

And then there were those who saw me somehow as a politician rather than a journalist, even though I have never stood for election, never worked for a political party, and never plan to do either. This was spectacularly ironic, given that many of those who make this accusation take a pay cheque from a political party every month, as employees on the Labour Party payroll, working for its media.

But because I openly say that I vote for the Nationalist Party (apparently, admitting to this in public and in writing is not allowed unless you actually work for the Nationalist Party) this must obviously mean that they pay me to write what I do, right, because no normal person in Malta would tell people how they vote and why. So then you have an only-in-Malta situation: pseudo-journalists who take their pay-cheque from the Labour Party screeching all over social media that I must be paid by the Nationalist Party and that somehow makes me a legitimate target for vile assault.

You can see what the Labour Party has been doing here. I’m clearly literate. I appear to be fairly sharp. I’m well read and seem to have quite a lot of general knowledge about a disconcerting variety of matters (“Min taħseb li int – mingħalik li taf kollox”). Horrifyingly, I am a native speaker of both English and Maltese, which throws them into a tangle of deciding whether the best insult is that I’m a tal-pepe snob who is against the workers and thinks they’re all ħamalli, or whether I’m a ħamalla myself who married strategically to acquire an important surname and status in life.

And of course, the fact that I was born into a sea of supporters of the Progressive Constitutional Party, the sworn ideological enemies of the old-style Nationalist Party (Stricklandjani, to use the more easily understood term), over several generations in both my maternal and paternal families, is never mentioned by the Labour Party. Because this is very dangerous information for Labour supporters to know. But the fact remains that my paternal grandfather was a Constitutionalist Party activist and fundraiser, his father was a senator for Strickland’s Party, my mother’s brother was a PCP electoral candidate, and his wife worked for Mabel Strickland. The first time I ever saw a newspaper-cuttings scrapbook, as a child, it was full of newspaper cuttings about the Strickland party’s activities and statements, and I had pulled it out of the bookcase in my grandparents’ country house (childhood is full of early-warning signs to which parents should be alert).

This is the perfect scenario for my views about politics and the political parties to be taken seriously by readers, a scenario which gives those views credibility. That is exactly what the Labour Party wishes to avoid, so it has sought to turn me into a cypher – the “Nationalist blogger”; the “ugly witch” (just like in medieval times) – and instead work on focusing all discussion among the more intellectually challenged of its supporters on what I look like, using a variety of photoshopped or unflattering images, rather than on the arguments I make and the stories I break. It doesn’t seem to worry them that this makes their supporters look even worse and more stupid and ignorant than they do at the best of times. The Labour Party has never had respect for its supporters. It just sees them as tools to be used for power, a means to an end.

The Labour Party has also encouraged prurient and offensive discussion about my private life and private business in a manner that truly must be a first in the democratic world outside Baku and Beijing. For it is in fascist and totalitarian dictatorships that journalists are deliberately exposed to systematic campaigns of slander organised by politicians. It is symptomatic of Malta’s proto-democracy that lots of people here don’t understand the different roles of journalists and politicians, and rank the two as somehow equal in an equal battle. Yet it is the role of journalists in a democracy to scrutinise politicians. It is not the role of politicians to scrutinise journalists. The first is democracy, the second fascism.

In September 2012, the Labour Party put my face on billboards across the island, among the faces of significant Nationalist politicians who included the Prime Minister of the time. There were no words on that billboard; the image was considered sufficiently effective in getting its abusive message across. The Labour Party achieved its aim. People began to recognise me who had never recognised me before. They slowed their cars in traffic to stare at me. They pulled down their car windows to shout abuse.

One of them even filed ‘hit and run’ charges against me in conspiracy with a corrupt police officer in a case that was thrown out of court as false – but not before it was plastered all over the front page of L-Orizzont with an enormous picture of my face. And then there were the ordinary but not particularly bright people who respond to branding in predictable ways and who, because they saw my face among those of politicians, had me down as a politician too. You would be astonished to know just how many people actually think, genuinely, that I am a member of parliament. When told that no, I am just a journalist, confusion clouds their face. “Eh, jien ħsibtek fil-politika. Allura għala tal-Labour dejjem jgħidu dwarek…”. Well, exactly.

The Institute of Maltese Journalists did not release a statement of protest when my face went up on that political billboard in the worst of the political tension leading up to the general election, and no other journalist raised the alarm or wrote an article about how shocking this was.

There were several reasons for this, including the three primary reasons I mentioned further up. But the real reason was that many of them were too busy becoming enamoured of Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party to see the flashing red light of danger. Come on, it’s only Daphne. She deserves it. She’s such a bitch (we can say that about her, but if we say it about a local singer, then PBS, Għaqda Nisa Laburisti and the Labour Party will issue statements). And of course it’s not a warning sign about how the Labour Party stands generally on the matter of freedom of expression and the free press – ma tarax. It’s only how the Labour Party stands on the matter of Daphne.

But it was a warning sign. Only fools couldn’t have seen that. The Labour Party isn’t interested in me as a person. It is only interested in me as a journalist. It is what I write that bothers Labour, not what I look like, though it seeks to impress on people that what it is really bothered about is my physical appearance and what sort of friends I have.

On the matter of the Labour Party’s attitude towards basic civic liberties, respect for the rights of the individual, tolerance of criticism, and press freedom, I have for the last 26 years or so been the canary in the coalmine. But as long as I was singled out for assault, no other journalists bothered. It was as though Hitler’s men had come along and carted off a lone Jew, and the other Jews said to themselves that, well, it must be because she committed some crime or because she always says the wrong thing and deserves it. And of course it’s not because Hitler and his men are in any way virulently anti-Semitic, so it’s never going to be a problem for the rest of us.

Now, post-Panama Papers, the scenario has changed. The Labour Party and the corrupt government it forms, with the usual help from its camp followers like the newspapers published by the General Workers Union, have begun to launch wild assaults on other members of the media and entire newspapers: The Malta Independent, the Times of Malta, and their sister Sunday editions.

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff is clearly outraged that he has lost all his leverage at Progress Press and Allied Newspapers through the sacking of his corrupt associate Adrian Hillman. He is now going hell for leather against those newspapers, including threats issued last Sunday about debts of €1.5 million which Progress Press owes his (licit) business and which he had converted into a loan. Of course, it is shocking that a newspaper publishing house should have accepted to be in direct debt to the leading mover and shaker in the Labour Party, who is now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, but it only happened because he was and still is in cahoots with the then managing director.

The Times of Malta and The Sunday Times, for the first time since 1987, have been given cause to remember what it is like to be at the receiving end of assaults from a corrupt Labour government. If Aesop had written a fable about this situation, the moral of the story would have been: when people set fire to your building with your staff inside, never trust them again.

More pertinently, now that Adrian Hillman is gone, those newspapers have become the targets of sustained viciousness and acts of intimidation by the Prime Minister’s corrupt chief of staff personally, a situation not helped by the fact that Progress Press – from what I gather through the market – has put a stop to all purchases from his business and is looking to other suppliers. And because Progress Press was by far his biggest account, that means Kasco’s bottom line is going to take an even bigger knock this year than it has been doing since Schembri set up his secret company in the British Virgin Islands in 2011.

The crux of the issue is that when a political party launches and maintains a sustained assault on a lone journalist who it sees as a threat, it is not an attack on an individual but an attack on press freedom generally. It is meant to eliminate that particular threat and pour encourager les autres. But the only response that sort of repulsive behaviour should meet with in a true democracy – and Malta is not one – is of resistance and general opposition.

I’ll say this to my fellow journalists, by which I do not mean the employees of any political party: the worst thing you can do when you see another journalist under assault by the government or the Opposition is sink your head below the parapet in the hope that the same thing will not happen to you, or take malicious pleasure in the spectacle. As we are seeing now, a political party that is prepared to attack one journalist to achieve its own ends will think nothing of doing the same to others when they become inconvenient too. The solution is not to avoid becoming inconvenient – for then what kind of journalist will you be? – but to fight back, or just leave the kitchen, transfer yourself to Keith Schembri’s payroll and spend your days playing with guitars if you can’t hack it.